Say "Pearl Buck" to most people, and they will respond: The Good Earth. So great and enduring has been the impact of this early masterpiece about China, which with other books won her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938, that the real women has often been obscured.

Now, in Pearl S. Buck: Revealing the Human Heart by Cornelia Spencer (the pen name of Pearl's sister), the whole woman appears, Pearl S. Buck has, it is true, written much of it in China, where she grew up as a girl and lived as a young woman. But she has written much of people elsewhere, too- people in Asia, the United States, the world—at one time using a pseudonym to throw off the track those critics who had wedded her, against her will, to Asian subjects and a "Chinese" style. Part of the reason she won the Nobel Prize was the biographies of her parents, missionaries, in China but Americans through and through. Nurtured as a child on the novels of Dickens, Pearl S. Buck has always had as a ruling passion the creation of real flesh-and-blood characters from the depth of her experience, brought to life in the richness of her imagination.

But if the creation of fiction has been her ruling passion, her concern with people in real life has been important, too. Getting the people of the West to understand those of the East, fighting in the cause of equality for all races everywhere, aiding in the adoption of children born of mixed races, working for better care and training of mentally retarded children-all these concerns have been part of her life.

In this biography the whole story is lovingly and excitingly told.

From the dust jacket